I am wondering what your favorite holiday is...and what makes it special. Maybe share your favorite holiday and something about it that makes it special to you.

My favorite holiday is Memorial Day! It falls at the end of May here and is in remembrance of those who gave their lives for this country's freedom. However, it is the unofficial start of summer! The beaches open, which here means they start charging fees to go on, the lifeguards and my beach friends return, and it is the beginning of everyone coming to the Jersey Shore (and if you watch the t.v. show it is really not like that...well, sort of ).

I think my favourite is the December Holiday, presents, food, presents, family, presents, friends, presents and did I mention presents?

Seriously though, I was able to go out today with my husband and my wheelchair to do a bit of holiday shopping and really enjoyed buying them for him. He works so hard, does so much and never asks for anything so it's a great opportunity to be able to spoil him.

I think my favourite holiday would be December too except that it is also the start of the summer and most years it is so hot it becomes a chore. Not this year though, yesterday it was 14 degrees C and bucketing down with rain. Today is fine again but only about 20. Today the Weather Ambassador (what a poncy name - what is wrong with Weather Forecaster? - what is the world coming to!) said that we can expect more settled weather for next weekend but no talk of hot weather thank goodness.

Sometimes we celebrate in mid-winter about 25 June and that is the perfect time to have all those hot dishes which are traditional.

Our grandies have been home from school since Wednesday and it is hard to cope with them being so excited while we are still trying to get things done. We have had them for a couple of days each, on their own, to try to ease the stress at home. Isn't it great how they can rise to the occasion when by themselves with Granma and Granpa. Perhaps the fact that they don't have broadcast TV at their home makes the difference. We had the Cartoon Channel all day yesterday while the rain poured down.

Today I was very noble and sat through a Chipmunks movie at the local theatre - and no I didn't fall asleep!!

I do like the summer, although I must admit that we avoid going anywhere on the actual bank holidays as it's so crowded everywhere these days and it's not much fun sitting in endless traffic jams for hours on end.

I would probably agree with Amanda and Judy about the December holiday. For a start, my hard working and permanently-stressed-at-work husband will have at least 10 days leave over the holiday break (perhaps more if I can pressgang persuade him to take more leave which is owing to him ) which does give him a bit of a chance to relax and brace himself for the new year. When I was working full time I used to love the December holiday because of all the parties and jollity around that time of the year........oh, the office parties!! My tolerant and long suffering husband used to collect myself and a car load of inebriated revellers at the end of the office party; his only stipulation was that nobody threw up in the car........ah, happy days!!!

Season's Greetings and Happy Holidays to all the lovely people on these forums!!

"Youse" is to me the most objectionable slang ever. Our gorgeous middle Granddaughter spent a bit over two years at a school which was 98% Polynesian - she was not happy there. She is 9 1/2 now and a great linguist (for 9!) she knows some Spanish and Maori and loves to do the daily Crossword with Granpa, has a reading age about 2 years ahead of her years.

Came home from that school one day upset - the other kids told her she didn't speak properly - she said "you kids" - told her the plural is "youse".

I get your point that it definitely is slang and I guess that our language is evolving all the time and maybe it is not just a South Pacific term but I think if we come back in 50 years we won't be able to understand a word.

Needless to say she is not at that school now, but my point is that I think youse will become common usage before we know it.

Better go to bed I think before I get myself embroiled in a discussion which will go nowhere.

Miocean, "you guys" has history for me...for sure! When me and sis were 5 and first went to America and met the step family one lady used to call us you guys and one of us would always say we're girls!!

Well, we may be in a "whoops" because the forum guidelines state: Our mission requires language that is appropriate for all ages, cultures, beliefs, and countries. We avoid cursing, swearing, "instant messaging" abbreviations, and slang (since it can be misconstrued or offensive in other languages and cultures)

I thought "youse" was typically New Jersey/New York and in my ignorance thought the rest of the world would know that, too. Interesting that it is not. I guess that's why the guidelines ask we don't use slang. I do not say it, I tend to use "you all" typically used in the Southern USA from my years of living in the south when referring to a group of people. "You" is probably grammatically correct, whether referring to singular or plural.

Ah, if you were from western Pennsylvania, you'd say 'you'uns' or 'youns' - no idea how that came to be!

My favorite holiday is Midsummer and it comes from many years living in the far north of the UK and southern Scandinavia. It's simply a celebration of having the most hours of light in any day of the whole year. It brings back memories of flowers, warmth, sunshine, and a relaxed celebration involving the whole community.

December Holiday in Florida is high on my list of favorite Holiday's or places to be on a Holiday.
I do believe our 4th of July celebrations at our home make that my favorite of Holiday's. Warm weather, sun, family and water sports. What more can a person ask for? Huh! Oh alright, then food makes the day complete. Also it happens to be my Mother's Birthday. So we really celebrate Independence Day.

Oh Jeannie, Midsummer sounds fabulous! I wish we could celebrate it now; I feel like we are in Midwinter here, with hardly any hours of sunlight.

My favorite holiday is my husband's birthday -- because we celebrate it every day, all month long, however we want. So he gets unlimited birthday dinners and I search the world high and low to find the "very best" of some thing for him. It doesn't have to be expensive, so to speak, but just the very best of its kind, so I spend all year trying to figure out something he will use every day and that is the very finest (in our price category, that is!), and then save up for it.

As you can imagine, each year this gets more difficult, as I've used up all the easy or obvious choices already. One year I had to talk him into shaving the old fashioned way, just so I could have another few years of presents to give him. (Shaving soap, shaver, shaving brush.)

On the topic of slang. You can only imagine how naive we were when we first started the forum, with no guidelines at all. Only through the School of Experience were our forum guidelines born. And then they grew (and GREW!) along with our Interesting Experiences, which are also known as Total Disasters.

One of those Interesting Experiences came when a US member used a totally common, everyday slang term -- and one of our New Zealand members was absolutely aghast that we allowed someone to post such a nasty slur. And oh my, it was a *really* nasty term in New Zealand!

That's when we stumbled upon the interesting phenomenon of bland slang in one country sometimes being beyond nasty in another country. Since our moderators can't spend all day long looking up words to see if they are "nasty" somewhere else in the world, we had to just go with the safer option of trying to eliminate slang, when possible.

As you can all see, we loosen the restrictions a little bit in Fun and Friendship, but if we knew that "youse" was a dirty word somewhere else, we'd need to eliminate it so that we wouldn't be offending anyone.

It's not easy, trying to have fun and keep World Peace all at the same time. Thanks to all of you for your understanding, and also for poking fun at our guidelines too. We have to have some type of stress relief from them around here or we'd go stark raving nuts!

My favorite holiday is Thanksgiving. I didn't grow up with it in England but have always enjoyed it in the US. It's a day of family, warmth (compared to December and January), great food and relaxation. No presents to wrap, trees to decorate, or customs to adhere to (unless you count football). And in southern NJ where I lived for many years, I heard the 'pronoun' ussens along with youse. As a former teacher, my pet peeve was u for you in formal writing. But I digress ... perhaps that's another topic.

As a former teacher, my pet peeve was u for you in formal writing.............

Oh KayTee, I know exactly what you mean! I even use apostrophes and capital letters when I send a text.......( how sad am I? No wonder it takes me half an hour to complete one!! ) Mind you, I must confess to using "u" and other abbreviations in the chat room; I type so slowly that I wouldn't have a hope of keeping up with the conversations otherwise!!

I happened to be fortunate to be selected as one of the teachers to take part in Bellcore's Teacher Institute in the early 90's. For those of you who may not know this, Bellcore was Bell Labs in New Jersey, USA, the scientific division of what is now AT&T. The scientists invented fiber optics, thereby changing the world. A select group of educators were placed into summer workshops based on their innovation in the classroom and were shown and taught what would soon be released to the world. We were shown the internet and were put in touch with people across the globe. At that time you were paying by the minute to use the internet so we were told not to be concerned about spelling, punctuation or grammar. On top of that, most of us had never used computers (they had green screens then) and it took forever to do something. As time went on, the educators my school determined that proper usage of language and spelling should be the protocol.

We were shown some very amazing things, especially for then. They programed all of our names into a computer and then played them back. Even very difficult names were pronounced correctly! So you can thank them for those awful voice systems you get placed into when you call somewhere today .

We were also shown a HUGE machine that they had inputted some major document into, I forget whether is was an encyclopedia, dictionary or religious document but there were thousands of pages. Then the put in the word "the" and every place it showed up was highlighted in yellow. Amazing! And searching was invented.

They also showed us Video On Demand and told us one day in the future you would be able to select a program to watch instead of having to watch what was currently showing. That took a while to hit the market.

We were able to contact the scientists if a student had a question. For instance, if I was doing a lesson in painting Outer Spacescapes while the students were learning about the planets in the classroom and a child asked something about Saturn that I couldn't answer, I could consult with them. Of course, I didn't have a computer in my classroom so that meant going upstairs on my break to the one computer that was hooked up to the internet, asking the question, and then going back and looking for a response.

Interestingly, shortly after these extremely brilliant scientists made their discovery, Bell Labs was disbanded and they were all let go. It was kind of like, we don't need you anymore, thanks anyway. See you, goodbye!

I still don't use texting shortcuts, by the time you do some of them you could have properly put in the word.

What are they for!!!!!!!!!!! Do you use them every time you add an S??

Do you think they don't get taught in junior school these days? I am getting old I know, and with it I am becoming a fussy old woman. I can accept that, but I can't get my head around poor grammar, particularly use of apostrophes and u. I have even seen L8 used in prose occasionally!!!! What is the world coming to.

Mind you, I get driven mad by my husband's lists. He abbreviates everything down to consonants with apostrophes for the vowels - why for heaven's sake!!! surely it is just as easy to write the word bread rather than br'd or milk rather than m'lk. He can't even use texting as his excuse because he doesn't do that either except to send a message saying 'phone me' and that's only the whole word because he doesn't know how to find the ' on his phone.

Your post is very interesting Miocean, I remember the second job I had as a Travel Consultant. I moved from a small local tour company to a NZ wide one and went from a diary type book to a 'computer' in another city no less. On an educational to Head Office I was taken into a room the size of my kitchen that housed the 'computer' and next door were the ladies who punched the cards!!! That was in 1972 I think. We have come a long way since then. Our first home computer was a Commodore on which the children could play games AND create greeting cards for their friends. I still have my first word processor which used floppy discs. We plan to have a clean out this summer and all those old bangers are going with our son-in-law to the Panasonic NZ Ltd recycling bin. He says they do retrieve some components but most actually still go to the dump.

I remember paper sacks at the supermarket, and the excitement when plastic singlet bags appeared, milk delivered to the gate in glass bottles (actually remember collecting the billy from the gate which the milkman filled from his big can - but don't tell anybody that!!!)

This is getting a bit too revealing, although I don't actually care who knows I am nearly 68. I am just as proud of that as always being the youngest in the class because my birthday was in the first week of the new year. My best friend (who I still see) hated it because she felt like a baby - I thought if I was youngest I must be smarter than the rest of them!!!!!!!

I really think I had better get on and do something constructive with the day, even though we are having a terrible summer with rain every day and I am running out of inside things to do.

Keep up the interesting posts - it gives me something to do that is out of the rain.

Jo: You're right, I can't text with abbreviations either. And I'm so glad iPhone usually knows its apostrophes. Oh the years I spent teaching those things. Some students used to think apostrophes were like salt and pepper and you just sprinkled them around occasionally.

Miocean: I do remember Bell Labs and its programs although I was never a part of it. How wonderful for you and your school district.

I think these forums (fora?) are like conversations and if they wander occasionally into other topics, all good, or all's well, or ?